As of 2 weeks ago, I am now working for Mozilla as European Community Manager. This is somewhat of a departure for me as up until now I have mostly been doing development work for a living with Briks and other employers before that. Yet in many ways it is a continuation of the work I have been doing as a Mozilla volunteer for a long time. After starting out myself on newsgroups and IRC, I moved into helping others new to the community. I helped scale out and organise the mozdev.org community at a time when it filled a gap for developers to host and work on their software. I helped run events, such as Mozilla’s presence at FOSDEM. And more recently I’ve been heavily involved in the Mozilla Reps program.

Europe is a very diverse region in many aspects, from culture to language to how business is done. It is a region going through tremendous upheaval right now, as indeed is much of the world linked though an ever pervasive Web and global economy. In this I see opportunity. Europe has some of the older Mozilla communities that started around localisation, and now new ones are springing up around all aspects of the project. As I’ve traveled around and met many great people and seen how communities work over the last few years, I’m amazed by the endless energy and ideas. This is a time of change for Mozilla as we move into the new areas to fulfill our mission. The community is rising to the challenge.

I’ve been hearing many interpretations of what a community manager is. Many people don’t even like the word manager as it can be misleading in some contexts. In general, I see my role as helping grow Mozilla. I’ll be working with communities to make sure they have all they need to do their work effectively, and with functional teams in the organisation to ensure they are working with the community to get more done. At Mozilla we push back against interests that go against users and rob them of choice. We do this through first-class products like the Firefox browser for desktop and mobile. We are going further with Firefox OS and the Marketplace to bring more choice to the mobile ecosystem. With Webmaker, we encourage you to create the Web, not just consume it. Our job is to empower you to shape your Web experience.

I’m really excited to continue working with everyone and looking forward to the challenges ahead.